People worldwide are familiar with Ernest Hemingway. They know him through his work and through his life, which is memorialized in Havana; Milan; Pamplona; Paris; Key West; Petoskey, Michigan; Ketchum, Idaho – where he committed suicide – and Oak Park, Illinois, his birthplace. And inveterate readers, casual readers, scholars, and prominent public figures admire the way he transformed prose with his direct, spare style. Former Senator John McCain counted For Whom the Bell Tolls as his favorite novel, and President John F. Kennedy cited Hemingway’s definition of courage, “grace under pressure,” in his 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage.

Hemingway was sui generis. He loved boxing, attending horse races, and studying bullfights. In addition, he caught 1,000-pound marlin, tracked bear, and even shot a lion. His personal life was messy though. He was married four times, he destroyed his friendships (including his relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald) through in-text jibes, in person, and in letters. He also had a tumultuous relationship with his mother. She criticized the subject matter of his work, especially The Sun Also Rises, and she sent him the gun with which his father committed suicide, making the decision for Hemingway not to attend her funeral an easy one.

Documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, whose previous series have included Baseball and The Vietnam War, have now taken on the man and myth of Hemingway which PBS will air on April 5 – 7. Burns says the documentary “attempts to show how flawed our assumptions about Ernest Hemingway and his writing have been. [We] want to offer viewers an honest portrayal of a complex and conflicted writer” who inspired many authors, including Joan Didion, who said in a 1978 The Paris Review interview:

Hemingway [influenced my writing], because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences.

Tobias Wolff writes, in the introduction of The Hemingway Stories, which was recently published by Scribner to coincide with the Burns series:

The complex undercurrents of Hemingway’s stories eluded me, but I responded to the plain clarity of their narratives, and their sheer physicality: the coldness of a stream; the pounding of a tent stake into the ground; the smell of canvas inside that tent.

Chang-Rae Lee, author of the recently-published My Year Abroad, adores In Our Time and has said it is the one book that he has re-read the most.

Hemingway described one aspect of his writing, known as the iceberg theory, in 1932’s Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

This method implores the reader to become part of the story. It is devastatingly present in “Hills Like White Elephants,” written in 1927 and included in The Hemingway Stories:

“Should we have another drink?”

“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.

“It’s lovely,” the girl said.

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

Edna O’Brien, has written about the power of Hemingway’s technique, particularly about that story in The Hemingway Stories, “What’s not said is so wonderful. The control that he mastered is one of his signature strokes of genius.” He first learned to control his prose during a sixth-month stint (1917-1918) as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. There, young reporters were given the paper’s stylebook, with the following edicts, which they were advised to follow: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” He continued his apprenticeship when he arrived in Paris in the early 1920s listening to the advice of expats Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, for whom Hemingway displays encomium in A Moveable Feast: “[Ezra] was the man I liked and trusted most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste—the one and only correct word to use.”

In the documentary series, Burns peels away the Hemingway macho mythology and reveals him as a prose craftsman. To accomplish this feat, Burns incorporates the voices of Jeff Daniels as Hemingway, with Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary Louise Parker, and Patricia Clarkson as Hemingway’s four wives. The Hemingway Stories features an introduction by Tobias Wolff and commentary from Mario Vargas Llosa, Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Mary Karr, and Abraham Verghese. Reading the stories with the documentary will help viewers better understand the author from Oak Park, IL. Readers should concentrate on stories from 1925’s In Our Time – especially “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “Soldier’s Home,” and “Big Two-Hearted River,” a master class on war trauma and prose restraint. By the end of the multi-night broadcast, viewers will know Ernest Hemingway better, and understand why authors have attempted to emulate him for decades. They will also realize that Hemingway’s style cannot be duplicated. Many have come close, but no one can match his economy of prose.

FIVE MORE HEMINGWAY STORIES TO READ AND TEACH

By Wayne Catan

“A Canary for One”

Hemingway wrote this ironic story in 1926 as his marriage to his first wife, Hadley, was deteriorating. It was first published in Scribner’s magazine in 1926, and later released in the 1927 collection Men Without Women. It is an ironic story about heartbreak and deceit. Hemingway places three unnamed people – a middle-aged American lady and an American couple – on an overnight train from the French Riviera to Paris. The American lady, who travels with a caged canary, discusses her daughter’s heart-wrenching breakup with a Swiss man. The separation, which the mother orchestrated, motivated her to purchase the singing canary. She believes the bird will alleviate her daughter’s loneliness. The American lady believes the Swiss man was undeserving of her daughter because “American men make [better] husbands.” The final sentence jolts the reader, displaying Hemingway’s further commitment to restraint.

“The Light of the World”

This story, included in 1933’s Winner Take Nothing, recalls tramp or hobo literature reminiscent of Jack London’s The Road. Two teen boys— Nick Adams* and his friend Tom – arrive in a small Michigan town looking for free lunch. They enter a bar, but the bartender is suspicious, so he kicks the boys out of his establishment. After the duo leave, they walk to the town’s train station where they join a crew of “five whores,” “six white men,” and “four Indians.” One of the whores weighs “three hundred and fifty pounds,” opening Nick’s eyes to something he has never experienced. The “Light of the World” is a rite of passage for Nick Adams because he strays from Horton Bay, Michigan where “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” and “The Three-Day Blow” are set. One should read “The Battler” with “The Light of the World.” In “The Battler,” Nick is knocked off a train, forcing him to venture through a hobo forest in Michigan where he meets the punch-drunk boxer, Ad Francis, and his accomplice Bugs. Although Hemingway writes about hopping trains in both stories, the author always rode the rails legally, paying for his rides.

“A Day’s Wait”

This is a touching father-son story published in 1933 in Winner Take Nothing. The nine-year-old boy Schatz has the flu, causing his one hundred and two fever. Hemingway posits the father as a caring man who reads to his young son and ensures that Schatz (“darling” in German) receives his medicine. In typical Hemingway fashion, though, the father leaves Schatz to shoot quail. While the father is outside in the cold hunting Schatz remains warm believing that he will die because “at school in France the boys told [him] you can’t live with forty-four degrees.” When the father returns from hunting, he allays his son’s fears: “You poor Schatz. You aren’t going to die. That’s a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal.” It is important to note that Hemingway’s father, Clarence, was a doctor and a young Hemingway read his father’s journals, so he understood medical parlance. It is also significant that Hemingway lived through the 1918 Spanish flu and Schatz’s illness was “a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.” Like COVID-19, if it did not reach your lungs, you could recover just fine. “A Day’s Wait” is based off actual events between Hemingway and his firstborn, Bumby. Hemingway’s second son, Patrick, has said that “A Day’s Wait” is his favorite Hemingway short story.

“A Very Short Story”

Hemingway met nurse Agnes von Kurowsky in July 1918 at the Red Cross Hospital in Milan where he was convalescing after an Austrian mortar shattered his knee. Agnes was 26 and Hemingway had just turned 19. “A Very Short Story” tells the story of Agnes (Luz in the tale) and Hemingway. In just one and one-half pages Hemingway writes about falling in love, having an argument, praying together, and Luz having an affair with an Italian major. After her affair, she sent the boy (Hemingway in real life) a Dear John letter, stating “that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair.” Hemingway received the actual letter from Agnes on March 7, 1919. The story sets the stage for Hemingway’s 1929 masterpiece A Farewell to Arms in which Catherine Barkley represents Agnes. “A Very Short Story” is featured in Hemingway’s masterpiece collection In Our Time (1925).

“The Sea Change”

This story, which originally appeared in This Quarter in 1931, begins in medias res – Latin for “in the middle of”: “All right,” said the man [Phil]. “What about it?” The “it” in the tale is the unnamed woman’s desire to have an affair with another woman. Phil and the woman argue about the idea, casually, in a bar, and the reader is shocked at the verdict. Hemingway, a master observer, obtained the idea for the story listening to a couple argue in St.-Jean–de-Luz, France. Writing about same-sex love was unheard of at the time, but Hemingway welcomed the shock value it brought to critics. He masterfully employed his iceberg technique in this story, providing 20 percent of the information to the reader’s conscious and 80 percent to their subconscious, making them part of the story.

*The Nick Adams stories are autobiographical in nature, and Hemingway modeled several of the characters in them on his experiences as a young man.

Wayne Catan teaches English – including a class on the short stories of Ernest Hemingway – at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix. A Hemingway scholar, Catan has presented papers about Ernest Hemingway at several national and international conferences. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, On the Seawall, The Idaho Statesman, and The Hemingway Review. He is spearheading a project in which he is interviewing all past PEN/Hemingway Award winners on behalf of The Hemingway Society.